In the imagined realm of legal fiction—and commerce as a whole is legal fiction—a “person” is always some form of artificial legal person created by law.
“A legal person is any subject matter to which the law attributes a merely legal or fictitious personality. This extension … is one of the most noteworthy feats of the legal imagination … Legal persons, being the arbitrary creations of the law, may be of as many kinds as the law pleases. Those … recognised by our own system, however, all fall within a single class, namely, corporations or bodies corporate.” — Jurisprudence, 7th ed., Sweet & Maxwell (1924), §113, p. 336.
Dictionary contrasts
Natural person. A human being, born of nature, as opposed to a juridical person generated by law. (Black’s Law Dictionary.)
Artificial person. A non-human entity the law creates, with its own rights and duties, distinct from any living man or woman.
Juridical person. An entity—such as a firm—that is not a single natural human, yet is authorised by law with duties and rights and treated as a separate legal personality. Also called artificial person, juristic person, or legal person; related to body corporate.
Statutes often stretch “person” to cover an individual, firm, partnership, association, fiduciary, executor, government body, LLC, or corporation. “Individual” usually points to a natural person, but in some contexts can include artificial ones. Importantly, the term person does not include the sovereign (Wilson v. Omaha Indian Tribe, 442 U.S. 653).
On a birth certificate, the legal person NAME is structured as a deceased estate trust—which is why definitions such as those in the U.S. Social Security Act 1935 include “trust or estate” within “person.”
Law itself often admits two entities: legal person and natural person. For example, New Zealand’s Bill of Rights Act 1990 s 29 applies, so far as practicable, to legal persons as well as natural persons.
Debtors by default
Every legally generated fictional person is a debtor by default: it is created without inherent productive capacity. Inferior status is often signalled by non-standard writing styles and/or by joining a family name/surname that is not part of a man or woman’s given-name estate title—legally “dead,” with no autonomous life.
Roman-law ideas of capitis diminutio (loss of status) are sometimes linked to capitalisation styles: least change (e.g. John Doe), medium (John DOE), maximum (JOHN DOE)—the last compared to bondage, stripping citizenship and family rights. ALL-CAPS names appear on tombstones, vessels, corporate signs, and documents such as driver licences. All-caps forms are also treated as “glosses” in American Sign Language transcription—not ordinary English prose.
Given name versus family name
Regardless of capitalisation, combining a given name with a family name forms an artificial legal person—whether JOHN DOE or John Doe.
A man or woman’s appellation—the given name—is living estate title (e.g. John). The estate is the “land” of mind, body, and soul, and the property that flows from living energy, including unalienable rights. The shared family name is a dead plural noun, not autonomous. Legalisation joins the living given name to that dead noun, producing a dead artificial person NAME and displacing unique living estate title.
Minimal grammatical separation uses a colon (e.g. John: Doe) or a fuller form such as John: of the family Doe. Adding a family name is optional; estate title of one or more given names (e.g. John-Henry) can suffice on documents. Living given names are proper nouns; fictional persons are not styled with that care.
See also: A “Person” Has No Body, When You Are Born, Your Living Identity.